ARCE Lecture: My Violent King

War and Violence in Non-Royal Sources

Niv Allon

The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Representations of violence abound in ancient Egyptian art and texts, where the figure of the smiting king is one of the longest enduring images. Trampling the nine bows with every step or recounting his victories in far away territories, the king is featured as a victorious conqueror who defeats Egypt’s enemies with vigor and violence. Many of these representations belong, however, to the royal sphere, and this paper will explore New Kingdom tomb art, autobiographical texts, stelae, and other objects to consider the image of the violent king among the elite and its own concepts of violence.

Niv Allon received his PhD in Egyptology from Yale University in 2014. That same year, he joined the Metropolitan Museum of Art as an assistant curator in the Department of Egyptian Art. He recently co-authored a book on Ancient Egyptian Scribes: A Cultural Exploration, which came out last May with Bloomsbury and he is currently working on a book manuscript titled Writing, Violence, and the Military: Images of Writing in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. 

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Reception to follow. 

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